What Kosmos isn't

It is not a replacement for Mapnik or Osmarender. Kosmos currently does not use a database to store OSM data. Instead it opens OSM files and loads them directly into memory. That means that there is a limit of how large a map area Kosmos can work with.

Kosmos rendering rules are much simpler than those of Mapnik and Osmarender. On one hand, this enables easy creation and maintenance, but on the other hand it is not as flexible as XSLT transformations to SVG used by Osmarender, for example.

Kosmos uses Microsoft.NET GDI+ library for drawing maps, which directly provides only a subset of graphics capabilities compared to those of SVG. That means that certain graphics features are currently not available to use in Kosmos map rendering. Hopefully this will improve with time.

Download

The primary/supported platform for Kosmos is Windows. You need to have Microsoft .NET 3.5 SP1 (available here) installed on your computer in order to run Kosmos.

Linux/Mono Support

As for the Linux/Mono support, there was some effort on my and other people's part to make Kosmos v1.x run on Linux. However there were quite a few problems with this. Also, the new Kosmos 2.0 contains some 3rd party libraries which are not very friendly to Mono. That is why I decided not to try to support Kosmos for Linux - I just don't have enough time. But since the software is free and the source code is available, if anybody wants to give it a go, they are welcome :)